Vevo Now Racking Up 3.7 Billion Views Per Month, $100M In Royalties Since Launch

Vevo has proven itself to be one of the fastest growing video sites of all time. They celebrated 341 million views when they launched in December 2009 and now, less than two years later, they have reported a whopping 3.6 billion monthly views in October and expect to hit 3.7 billion when they release their November stats. But these views have come at a cost. Since they launched, Vevo has reportedly paid out over $100 million in royalties and, as such, has yet to achieve profitability.
Alex Pham of the LA Times reports that Vevo has paid out royalties to the songwriters, recording artists, record labels and other music copyright holders that make up the content on the online music video site. To account for these royalties, Vevo places ads alongside the music videos so that they can continue to offer their service for free.

Rio Caraeff, chief executive of Vevo, says, “We’re growing revenue in a way that doesn’t try to get people to pay for something they have never paid for before.” He projects that the service will become profitable at some point over the next year as the audience continues to grow.

And grow it does! Gavin O’Malley of MediaPost News reports that in November alone Vevo accounted for 63.3 million unique visitors in the United States with 7.6 million of these viewers going directly to VEVO.com. Vevo grabs a large portion of its traffic from YouTube, where it accounts for many of the online video giant’s most-viewed music videos. The playlist below features the most-viewed music videos on YouTube from major music labels in 2011. All but one of them are hosted on VEVO YouTube channels, with ‘Jennifer Lopez – On The Floor ft. Pitbull’ topping the charts with over 454 million views.

You can see a visual representation of Vevo’s growth in the charts below. Note that these statistics are for the United States only and that the dates should start in December 2009 and end in October 2011. The dates all say 2011, so just replace the earlier dates with 2009 and 2010.

Janko Roettgers of GigaOM reported these key metrics for Vevo in 2011, along with the charts above:

Vevo delivered 827 million video streams to 57 million unique U.S. viewers in October 2011

The average viewer spends an average of 66 minutes watching 14.5 videos per month on Vevo

The Vevo mobile apps have been downloaded over 13 million times and had 3.9 million active users in October

Megan O’Neill is the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times. Megan covers everything from the latest viral videos to online video news and tips, and has a passion for bizarre, original and revolutionary content and ideas.

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